Monthly Archives: July 2021

When Green Met Blue
 
 
Sweet Pine needles and sap-shingled cones 
carpeted the grassy yard. Green boughs high above 
full, deep in a sky of robin’s-egg hue. A view 
perceived lolling flat, face turned up, 
at the base of towering trunks.
 
A particular meeting, of that green with that blue,
thrives in this heart, where memory dwells.
I can feel it now, sitting in April sun, 
as birds chirp so clearly, oblivious. 
Pure bliss and simple gift; One-ness.

 

Marjorie Moorhead writes from northern New England. Happy to have found the language and community of poetry, her work addresses environment, survival, relationship. The author of two chapbooks, and a forthcoming collection, included in nine anthologies, and many literary sites, much of Marjorie’s work can be seen here: 
https://marjoriewritespoetry.wordpress.com/places-you-can-see-my-work/

When Blue Breaks
 
through the clouds
in pools of relief
 
from solid monotone grey-white
of January skies,
 
my heart sighs, rejoicing 
in reprieve.
 
Oppressive grey covered all
like a silencer, muffling.
 
Blue breaking through
brings a melody
 
of gratitude.
A feeling that yes,
 
what’s essential and true
presents itself
 
clear; crystal; 
beyond hazy daze 
 
of cover-up.
Blue breaks through,
 
sharp as a thorn jutting from a vine;
blue as a fallen icicle piercing
 
the snow. Its shadow, where it lands,
arrowing the way to go;
 
freeing up possibility;
cracking open a lane 
 
for discovery 
of what to do. 

Marjorie Moorhead writes from northern New England. Happy to have found the language and community of poetry, her work addresses environment, survival, relationship. The author of two chapbooks, and a forthcoming collection, included in nine anthologies, and many literary sites, much of Marjorie’s work can be seen here: 
https://marjoriewritespoetry.wordpress.com/places-you-can-see-my-work/

Whales of Summer
 
Miles out past Cape Cod’s last curl of coastline, 
the whales of summer belly up 
to an underwater banquet,
marked on maritime maps 
as Stellwagen Bank.
 
The giants surface with exhaled blows
and open-jawed feasts 
of plankton and krill scooped up 
amid tons of water sifted and spat 
past brushy baleen filters.
 
Flocks of canny seabirds 
track the pungent smell,
circle and land in the gaping hangars
to pluck a pilfered meal,
squawking their good fortune.
 
The whales flirt with tourists, wave fins, 
flash flukes revealing singular designs
that naturalists recognize and greet by name.
Humpbacks propel their huge hulks into the air
before inhaling and diving into the deep. 
 
The whales leave footprints 
on the surface, flat circles that widen 
and slowly surrender to the chop. 
In gobsmacked silence, all eyes stare 
into the distance, casting hope upon the waters.

Emily-Sue Sloane (emilysuesloane.com) lives in Huntington Station, NY.  Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including Amethyst Review; Corona, a Walt Whitman Birthplace anthology; Front Porch Review; Shot Glass Journal; The Long Island Quarterly; and Boston Literary Magazine. Writing helps her appreciate life, especially in a pandemic.

Evening Prayers
 
They, the last of the grey ghost ponies
sleep above the valley, the warm blue of morning,
all their wonder bleeding away.
 
Rich is the moment of belonging. Sleep away…
till the dreams race you home
to the fields where
a yellow flower stands watching the sun.
 
Twisting ever so slightly,
nearly immeasurable,
but reaching none the less.
 
Evening prayers worn out
and the blue night falling, 
ask,
is this all that comes,
 
as if there may be more.
 

Antoni Ooto is an internationally published poet and flash fiction writer.
Well-known for his abstract expressionist art, Antoni now adds his voice to poetry. 
Reading and studying the works of many poets has opened another means of self-expression.

His recent poems have been published in Amethyst Review, The BeZine, Green Ink Poetry, The Poet Magazine, Brown Bag Online, The Wild Word, and many journals and anthologies.
He lives and works in upstate New York with his wife poet/storyteller, Judy DeCroce.

Evening
by Rainer Maria Rilke

The evening slowly changes its attire,
held for it by a border of old trees.
You watch the realms depart from you and veer
away: one falls and one ascends the skies. 

They leave you, who don’t quite belong to either,
not quite as dark as the silent house, not quite
as surely calling forth what lasts forever
as that which turns to star and climbs each night.

They leave you inexpressibly unwinding
your life—enormous, ripening, tinged with fear—
now limited in scope, now comprehending,
by turns becoming stone in you and star.



Abend

Der Abend wechselt langsam die Gewänder,
die ihm ein Rand von alten Bäumen hält;
du schaust: und von dir scheiden sich die Länder,
ein himmelfahrendes, und eins, das fällt;

und lassen dich, zu keinen ganz gehörend,
nicht ganz so dunkel wie das Haus, das schweigt,
nicht ganz so sicher Ewiges beschwörend
wie das, was Stern wird jede Nacht und steigt;

und lassen dich (unsäglich zu entwirrn)
dein Leben bang und riesenhaft und reifend,
so daß es, bald begrenzt und bald begreifend,
abwechselnd Stein in dir wird und Gestirn.

Susan McLean, professor emerita of English at Southwest Minnesota State University, has published two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of the Latin poet Martial.  Her translations of Rilke have appeared in Subtropics, Transference, Presence, and elsewhere.

 Peter Hackett

His mind was a bright garden where God walked
And watched everything:
The white tablecloths wilting in wet Galilee heat,
The crumbling mortar that the Romans brought,
And the bees buzzing.
 
When it rained – it rarely rained -
The drops came bouncing off the hardened earth,
Springing up again like shoots, sparkling green,
Reflecting all the colours of the world about them.
 
Food and drink shone with so much sun
You could sink inside them, rest your eyes:
It’s risky to look too long at God.
He shaded his eyes and squinted behind glasses,
 
Fine paintbrush hairs like lashes to shield him from the glare.

Note: Peter Hackett SJ was a priest and gifted painter - as well as an editor, librarian, headteacher of several schools, Master of Campion Hall, Oxford, and even (during wartime service in the Royal Navy) deputy harbourmaster of Venice.

Corinna Keefe is a freelance writer currently based in the UK. She has previously published poetry with Broken Sleep Books and Enthusiastic Press.

Selah

After black clouds swirled in the sky,
and rain made a lake of the driveway,
the early evening turned so quiet
I could hear suds dissolving in the sink
from the sponge I just squeezed out,
bubbles popping, draining away.
And I dropped so easily into myself
like a rock sinking through clear water,
the scribe writing the story of my life 
must have decided to insert the word,
selah, that appears over and over
in the Psalms, and which we can only
guess is an invitation to the reader:
Pause here in the text and leave room
between this breath and the next
for the sound of that still, small voice
rising up in you.

James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry, The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. jamescrews.net

sanctus
 
the air flows over us
the dogs flow between us
criss-crossing the path
 
suspended above us
an awning of light
in green and pearl
 
glittering motes
floating blessing

Nicole Lee was born in Kuala Lumpur and educated at Malvern and Oxford. She has worked as a banker in Hong Kong and London and now lives in Wandsworth, works in Kew and writes poetry. She has been published in various online journals and long-listed in the National Poetry Competition.

Waking

Light beckons—new eyes open—unhardened,
motes of light float in tremulous air.
It is my waking, and I am cresting with thanksgiving
as the Enoree crests her banks
when she is too full, too full, as joy is cresting
throughout these vining-most words, because
I—I am alive, if only a mote in the sea of 
God’s eye, even in these days of fermenting fear,
I am full of gladness.
And while fear and trembling may come with 
the coyote’s death howls,
hope never flees,
for in the morning, in the fire-green swaying
of trees, in the umbrous empty sparrow’s nest
--a jealous tomb--
Light beckons...

Melissa Chappell is a native South Carolinian. She has a BA in Music Theory and a Master of Divinity. Her latest publications are Doors Carelessly Left Ajar (Alien Buddha Press, 2020) and For the Next Earth (Wipf and Stock, publication pending). She shares her life with her family and two miniature schnauzers.
nativenoise.livehttps://www.patreon.com/nativenoise

A branch, a branch, a plum, a fig 
 
Intended as a counterpoint to anticipation: 
life as a narrative a thousand times reconfigured,
reconstructed. The page count an impossible 
arithmetic of days, months, years. The genre
undetermined until the midnight hour 
at the hospital or elsewhere. 
 
Afterwards, still, a grand fabrication: 
my grandmother replayed, reminisced, coloured in 
with wild imaginings - turned nearly mythical, 
the surplus of fiction having now overcome 
the obstacle of her presence, the stubborn 
denial of my claims to shape. 
 
The shape, then: overlays of lines and cycles, 
in long and slow - it all depends on the yardstick, 
which is never granted. False starts and curves 
that circle back onto themselves, the role 
of particular characters nebulous, inter-
changeable, a tangle of misappropriations. 
 
The thick of it: impossible to see the space 
between events and people, the distance
between intention and receipt. An interweave
of echoes, feedbacks, accidents of loops, 
Larsen. It would take a lifetime, another still,
yet another, to attempt to delineate its sense
 
and choose the correct title. In such
implacable circumstances, what purpose hope 
or hope for premeditation? Why favour
one partial plan, deck of imaginings 
over others, infinite in number. A branch,
a branch, a plum, a fig - all equal,
 
their value: undetermined. 

Lorelei Bacht is a European poet living in Asia with her family, which includes two young children and a lot of chaos. Her current work is primarily concerned with motherhood, marriage, and aging as a woman. This year, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such publications as OpenDoor Poetry Magazine, Litehouse, Global Poemic, Visual Verse, Visitant and Quail Bell. She can be found on instagram: @lorelei.bacht.writer